I have a new role model: Steve Nelle, a wildlife biologist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, an arm of the USDA, in San Angelo. Martin and Madroño Ranch’s redoubtable manager Robert and I went to hear him speak about “Managing Your Hill Country Habitat Effectively” at the spring meeting of the Bandera Canyonlands Alliance in Utopia last week. There was a good turnout of area landowners, ranging from all-thumbs novices like Martin and me to older ranchers whose wide, calloused hands spoke to a lifetime of work with the land.

For those of you with no interest in land management, stick with me; it’s not actually my topic, although Nelle gave an excellent presentation on the role of ash juniper (commonly referred to as cedar) in the Hill Country ecology. Cedar is a species that everybody loves to hate because it’s so remorselessly successful, often at the expense of other species—sort of the Gordon Gekko of Hill Country flora. People here have Opinions about how to manage cedar, ranging from getting rid of most of it to getting rid of all of it.

Nelle spent most of his talk gently lobbing little bombs onto these Opinions, even as his rhetoric defused them. First, he had the authority of thirty-five years of fieldwork, although even as he established his authority, he encouraged us to question it, pointing out that he had spent most of his time in mesquite country, not cedar country. Second, he showed that he knew his audience by noting that one of his principal sources was a local, Eric Lautzenheiser, who has argued that cedar has been unfairly stigmatized; when he brought Lautzenheiser’s name up, Nelle had to pause briefly while several in the audience discussed the exact location of the Lautzenheiser family’s ranch. Third, he was funny. He quoted H. L. Mencken, who said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is simple, neat, and wrong,” and when someone asked him how to address a specific issue, he began by saying, “This isn’t the right answer; it’s just what I’d do.” Finally, he acknowledged that there are multiple ways of managing land well; he encouraged each of us to be patient, persistent students of our own land and not to let anyone else tell us what to do with it. He trusted that all of us loved our land and wanted to do the best we could for it. In other words, he expected the best from us.

During the talk I wondered if people might not actually get up and leave, so persistently did Nelle herd up and shoot the sacred cows of cedar control. In fact, as we left, Robert said something like this: Well, hell! He just blew holes in everything I thought I knew! But we agreed that the presentation was ultimately persuasive because of Nelle’s disarming willingness to claim little authority for himself, to link his own experience to someone already known to many in the room, and to respect the experience of everyone present. I’m ready to send him to negotiate between our warring political parties in Washington and Austin.

He was the latest and most welcome example of how people of strongly differing opinions might talk to each other, an undervalued skill these days. The religious historian Karen Armstron recently published a book entitled Twelve Steps to a More Compassionate Life, structured consciously around the twelve-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous. With it, she hopes to reclaim what she says is the original and most powerful directive of all the world’s great religions, which is to train adherents to become skillful practitioners of the Golden Rule in both its positive and negative formulations: always treat others as you yourself wish to be treated, and do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you. She adds that all these religions “insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group; you must have concern for everybody—even your enemies.”

She lays out a program to help us break our addiction to egotism, which causes us to act with thoughtless violence in both private (our thoughts and relationships) and public (our politics and religion) arenas. “We cannot think how we would manage without our pet hatreds and prejudices that give us such a buzz of righteousness,” she writes; “like addicts, we have come to depend on the instant rush of energy and delight we feel when we display our cleverness by making an unkind remark and the spurt of triumph when we vanquish an annoying colleague.”

To those who would belittle this effort as naïve, she responds that the great religions all arose in response to profound violence:

[T]he sages, prophets, and mystics of these traditions did not regard compassion as an impractical dream. They worked as hard to implement it in the difficult circumstances of their times as we work for a cure to cancer today. They were innovative thinkers, ready to use whatever tools lay at hand in order to reorient the human mind, assuage suffering, and pull their societies back from the brink.

They were warriors of nonviolence, working to break the deeply entrenched cycles of violence directed at self, neighbor, and the world—not a job for the faint of heart.

These are the (wildly simplified) steps she suggests for those who would break their addiction to egotism and violence:

1. learn what the world’s religions teach about suffering and compassion;
2. look at the expanding rings of your own world and see where suffering is present and compassion is absent;
3. develop compassion for yourself, for if you cannot acknowledge your own pain, you will not be able to acknowledge the pain of others;
4. use the power of art to develop the muscles of empathy;
5. learn to watch yourself mindfully, without judgment, in order to know who you are and to know that you are more than your thoughts about who you are;
6. know that every other being has the same desire to be seen and acknowledged that you do, and to act toward others accordingly;
7. acknowledge the extremely limited horizon of your knowledge, of yourself, of anyone else, or of any particular situation;
8. wonder how you might speak to someone with profoundly differing views from your own, given the fact that you know very little;
9. become aware that you cannot restrict your wonderings to people you know, but that you must extend your hope for wellbeing beyond the bounds of your tribe;
10. become curious about a people you know nothing about;
11. realize the radical commonality between you and those whom you don’t know;
12. see that to hate your enemy is to hate yourself, and that to love your enemy is a matter of survival.

I actually don’t like this book very much; it calls me out on lots of behaviors I thoroughly enjoy, like the one that calls us away from trying to defeat opponents verbally and exhorts us to enter empathetically into a rival viewpoint. Armstrong points out that we often identify so strongly with our ideas that we feel physically assaulted when they are questioned, criticized, or corrected. Truth becomes an ancillary issue when we are so enmeshed with our ideas that we can’t imagine another way of thinking, nor enter imaginatively into a perspective that counters our own. Armstrong exhorts us to listen with “the principle of charity,” which requires us to assume that whoever we listen to has as much need to be taken seriously and respectfully as we do.

Well, hell.

While pondering Armstrong’s injunction to respond charitably to my fellow humans, I was reminded of the description of Charles Darwin in Adam Gopnik’s Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln ,and Modern Life. Gopnik wrote that even if Darwin got some of the particulars of evolution wrong—which he did—he got them wrong in the right way, because the spirit of his enquiry into the minutiae of biological operations was filled with the kind of reverent curiosity about all living creatures that Armstrong calls us to show about the human community. Gopnik describes Darwin’s last publication, an unlikely best seller:

The Origin and The Descent of Man are more obviously great books, masterpieces of the human spirit. But if I had to pick up one book to sum up what was great and rich about Charles Darwin, and in Victorian science and the Victorian mind more generally… it might well be On the Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms. Limitless patience for measurement… an ingenuous interest in the world in all its aspects, a desire to order many things in one picture, a faith that the small will reveal the large. And a gift for storytelling: Darwin makes the first person address never feel strange in this scientific text, because we understand that the author is in a personal relation with his subject, probing, testing, sympathizing, playing the bassoon while the earthworms listen and striking the piano while they cower, and trying in every way to see who they are and where they came from and what they’re like—not where they stand in the great chain of being beneath us, but where they belong in the great web of being that surrounds us, and includes us.

Personally, I can imagine playing a bassoon for earthworms more easily than I can imagine entering imaginatively the minds of the many politicians and cultural commentators whose bloviating makes me seethe. But our survival depends on listening carefully and appreciatively to each other. Steve Nelle will make me think about the particular life and condition of each cedar tree we cut down. Perhaps this mindfulness will extend out toward my own species, though I may have to route it through the earthworms first.

What we’re reading
Heather: Amy Stewart, Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army and Other Diabolical Insects
Martin: H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900 (still)

Like Rob Fleming, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, I seem to have a strong taxonomic impulse. Longtime readers of this blog have already seen several manifestations of my obsession with list making, but Heather and the kids will tell you that one of my more annoying habits is my annual end-of-the-year insistence that we all update the Kohout family top ten lists.

Every New Year’s, I insist that the whole family, and whatever friends and innocent bystanders happen to be around, sit down and list their ten all-time favorite novels, movies, and albums. This always occasions a good deal of grumbling, at least from the family, but they usually do it.

Here are the basic rules:

• Each list must include ten items, no more and no less, though I’ll cut you some slack when it comes to works in multiple parts (for example, we customarily count The Lord of the Rings trilogy or the Harry Potter series as one entry).
• Unlike so many end-of-the-year lists, these aren’t your favorites from the last twelve months; they’re supposed to be your all-time favorites, which is why you’ll always find at least a couple of children’s books on my list.
• The items don’t have to be in order of preference; just your ten favorites, in whatever order they occur to you.
• Plays count as fiction, as does epic poetry (The Odyssey, Paradise Lost); lyrical poetry does not.
• All this is done with the understanding that if you were to do it again tomorrow, you might come up with a very different list.

Since we’re approaching the end of another year, and I’m preparing to crack the whip on the family again, I thought it might be interesting to share my own most recent top-ten lists, even at the risk of exposing myself to the ridicule of our readership. (More so than usual, I mean.)

Without further ado, then, here they are:

Fiction (in alphabetical order by author)
Richard Bradford, Red Sky at Morning
Margaret Wise Brown, The Sailor Dog
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Dennis Lehane, The Given Day
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Richard Price, Lush Life
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Movies (in alphabetical order by title)
Casablanca
Funny Bones
The Godfather/The Godfather Part II
Groundhog Day
Local Hero
A Night at the Opera
Sense and Sensibility
The Third Man
Wings of Desire
Young Frankenstein

Albums (in alphabetical order by artist)
Dave Alvin, Ashgrove
The Cambridge Singers/La Nuova Musica, directed by John Rutter, The Sacred Flame: European Sacred Music of the Renaissance and Baroque Era
Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac
Manu Chao, Clandestino: Esperando la Ultima Ola
Derek and the Dominoes, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
Howlin’ Wolf, The Definitive Collection
Iron and Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog
Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, All the Roadrunning
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
Jordi Savall, El Nuevo Mundo: Folías Criollas

Bonus List: Nonfiction (in alphabetical order by author)
Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War< Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
Tracy Kidder, Home Town
Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods
David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

To me, one of the pleasures of this exercise, besides the inherently enjoyable experience of summoning up cherished treasures from one’s past, is seeing what’s on other people’s lists, which can be quite revealing. (I, for example, clearly have a thing for lightweight movie comedies and for books about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.) They can also bring some worthy books or movies or music to your attention, or inspire you finally to read or watch or listen to that classic you’ve been meaning to read or watch or listen to for years.

So what about you, Faithful Reader? What works have mattered most to you over the course of your life?

What we’re reading
Heather: Gail Caldwell, A Strong West Wind: A Memoir
Martin: Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket

I was back in my shiny new persona as salesperson last week, driving out to all the dude ranches around Bandera in hopes of scaring up a market for the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of bison meat we will soon have for sale. Reaction was generally favorable, despite the fact that I didn’t have some basic information at hand, like the prices we’ll be charging.

Aside from feeling like a dummy, a phony, and a bat-brained loony, I had fun. First, there’s very little that I enjoy more than looking at other people’s property. Second, I got to drive down some Hill Country roads I hadn’t been on before and go through the Hill Country State Natural Area, a secluded 5,000-plus-acre park dappled with beautiful blooming grasses and gayflowers, stands of hardwoods, and shining creeks. The third fun thing was getting out and meeting people—not a pleasure my usually introverted self would have anticipated. Our pattern when we go to Madroño has been to get there and dig in, not coming out unless we need something really important, like the newspaper or beer or ice cream or antihistamines. Now, for the first time, we’re starting to meet our neighbors. We’re starting—just barely—to find our way into the community.

I’ve also been rereading Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself, in which community is a central concern. (The book has easily reaffirmed its place on my top-ten favorite novels list.) So this week “community” seems to be the theme that wants to beat me over the head until I wake up and pay attention.

As you might guess from the subtitle, Jayber Crow concerns a small-town Kentucky barber whose life spans most of the twentieth century. Orphaned at an early age, Jayber is raised by a loving great-aunt and -uncle, who die when he is ten. He is sent to an orphanage and finally, a dozen years later, makes his way back to Port William to become its barber, grave-digger, and church janitor. A philosophical-minded bachelor, Jayber watches the community (that’s a map of the whole fictitious area above) over the course of several wars and the encroachment of highways and agricultural technology. Although he witnesses and endures great suffering, at the end he can say truthfully that his book is about Heaven because of the profound love the community bears for itself and for its place, both temporal and spatial.

In part, this love manifests itself in Port William’s economic life. When Jayber returns to Port William, he finds that the town’s previous barber has left, not being able to support his family on his shop’s limited income. Jayber is immediately taken by an old friend to see the town banker, who in introducing himself says, “I’m glad to know you. I knew your mother’s people.” He offers to loan Jayber the money to buy the old barbershop; Jayber describes the terms of the loan as “fair enough, but very strict in what he would expect of me.”

Jayber adds, “You will appreciate the tenderness of my situation if I remind you that I had managed to live for years without being known to anybody. And that day two men who knew who and where I had come from had looked at me face-on, as I had not been looked at since I was a child…. I felt revealed, as if to buy the shop I had to take off all my clothes.” Going into business requires him to become a part of the community, to care about its constituent parts in order to make his own way in the world.

I had imagined that this community might make Adam Smith, the patron saint of free-market economics, sneer: it lives within the limits of the land’s fertility, repairs what is broken, patches what is torn, and remains deeply suspicious of debt. Its citizens are generous to those in need, recognizing that they cannot prosper individually without prospering corporately. The antihero of the novel, Troy Chattam, is an ambitious young farmer who contemptuously rejects the old-fashioned ways of his father-in-law; Troy’s mantra is “modernize, mechanize, specialize, grow.” He goes into debt to buy new machinery and listens to agribusiness experts who tell him to use every bit of soil on the place: “never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle.” He seems to be a firm believer in the “invisible hand,” famously posited by Smith in his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, which supposedly guides markets to produce the highest quality goods for the lowest price to the benefit of both producers and buyers; this is what we used to call the American way. Like that of the city for which he was named, however, Troy’s is not a story with a happy ending.

But wait—why in heaven’s name is Adam Smith suddenly part of this conversation? Because I, despite my shocking ignorance of economics, just read Adam Gopnik’s fascinating article on Smith in the October 18 issue of The New Yorker. In it Gopnik argues that Smith’s real question “was not the economist’s question, How do we get richer or poorer?, or even the philospher’s question, How should one live? It was the modern question, Darwin’s question: How do you find and make order in a world without God?”

Gopnik is ostensibly reviewing Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, by Nicholas Phillipson, but he is really using Phillipson’s book as a jumping-off point for his own meditations on economics and community. Readers of The Wealth of Nations tend to ignore Smith’s earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but by doing so, according to Gopnik, we “lobotomize our own understanding of modern life, making economics into a stand-alone, statistical quasi-science rather than, as Smith intended, a branch of the humanities.” In order for humanity to live in community, Smith posits the necessity of “an impartial observer who lives within us, and whom we invent to judge our actions.” Without this imaginative capacity, a market economy can’t exist; unless we can put ourselves in the place of our fellows, we can’t imagine what they might need. “For Smith, the plain-seeing Scot,” writes Gopnik, “the market may not have been the most elegant instance of human sympathy, but it’s the most insistent: everybody has skin in this game. It can proceed peaceably only because of those moral sentiments, those imaginary internal judges.”

Unfortunately, those imaginary internal judges recede into the background when producers band together in order to eliminate competition and control prices; according to Phillipson (via Gopnik), Smith believed that “the market moves toward monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define, and of the sovereign state to restore, free play.” The market works toward the benefit of all only when it is broadly just—defined (by me) as being in the long-term interests of both producer and consumer. When the scenario Berry imagines in Jayber Crow comes to pass—when economic and business practices fray the fabric of community rather than protect it—then we live in epically tragic times, like those of Troy. When we find communities in economic disarray, then, according to the father of free-market economics, imaginations incapable of sympathy are at the root of the problem.

Of course, this is a pretty self-serving position, since we at Madroño are about to go head-to-head with such giants as H-E-B, who can charge much less for bison meat than we can. But I honestly believe that the long-term health of H-E-B depends on a diverse economic ecosystem in which the building of community—which requires a mutually sympathetic imagination—will rest on the flexible backs of small, dynamic businesses. Which maybe, with the help of our local community, we will become.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself
Martin: Bill Minutaglio, In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas